1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and a recording medium, and more particularly to an information processing apparatus and method, a program, and a recording medium that allow the user to search for or edit data such as a video, more easily.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, more and more metadata, in which information on filmed video material data (hereinafter also called as material data) is described, is used in the production field of video work such as a TV program and video contents. Such metadata refers to data used to search for or edit material data.
To effectively utilize such metadata, it is necessary for the metadata to have compatibility among a plurality of apparatuses used in the production of a video work so that a video signal reproducing apparatus such as an editing apparatus can use metadata generated by a video signal recording apparatus such as a video camera.
To achieve this, the metadata description format has been standardized to ensure the consistency of the description format and the meaning of metadata. For example, in MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) 7, more versatile XML (extensible Markup Language) is used for describing metadata to standardize the format of metadata.
However, in spite of an effort to standardize metadata, the concept and the object differ, in practice, among manufacturers that manufacture and sell video signal recording apparatuses and video signal reproducing apparatuses, and therefore, there is a possibility that manufacturers uniquely extend and describe metadata.
Although metadata maybe uniquely extended by each manufacturer in MPEG 7 as described above, the definition of metadata extended by some manufacturer is not regulated. Therefore, the problem is that metadata including the contents extended by some manufacturer is deleted or changed by the apparatus of some other manufacturer that does not know the extension.